A little confused with my FPS

Oethe · Jan 28, 2015

So long story but I will shorten it as best as I can.

I have been trying for the life of me to get above 30fps with Oculus Rift on Elite. now I have two GTX 980s. One is the Classified EVGA the other is the EVGA Superclocked so 1291-1392 MHz and 1266 - 1367 MHz respectively. SLi config obviously.

I have tried regular 1920x1080 along with DSR 2x, 3x, 4x and all configurations of the Low to Ultra in-game. I have also tried pre-rendering frames, performance/quality modes and triple buffering.

For the life of me even with all performance, no DSR, and on Low I pull maybe only 2-3 fps more than if I go 3x DSR and Ultra. Which never bumps above 30 FPS. Usually the later runs at 24-27 and the former is 27-30.

I should point out that this is while in Stations. I have not tested out, outside of Stations as I know Stations are the biggest hit. So my question is to those claiming to get a constant 75 FPS in Elite. Do you include Stations? If so what are your settings overall.

My CPU is AMD FX-8350 (For the unknowing pretty much 4GHz 8-core processor) and 2x 8 GB DDR3 1333MHz.

Tips and hopefully solution or answer on this occurrence is appreciated. If it turns out you all meant when -not- in a Station I will have my answer.

Though I will continue to beat myself up on why some people run other games on a regular 780 at nearly double my FPS.

Jesse30 · Jan 28, 2015

Make sure you running Elite in extended mode, force VSync in the nvidia control panel to "adaptive..", and turn off triple buffering. Additionally, if that is not enough turn off motion blur, ambient occlusion, and shadows to medium.
My system spec
i5 4670k
GTX 660 sli
8gb ram
SSD
70 to 75fps

robdood · Jan 28, 2015

Sounds like you have some vsync issue? Don't listen to the above recommendation for 'adaptive vysnc'! Adaptive vsync will cause vsync to lower framerate if you can't hit the highest, eg in regular games, if you can't hit 60, even if it's 59 it'll drop to 30!

I'd set the vsync setting in nVidia control panel to "let the application decide". In Elite, make sure the vsync is enabled and the frame limiter is off. These options disable when you enable the rift though, so not sure if they've bugged out, may be worth deleting you settings folder so everything rebuilds when you launch the game.

Definitely use extended mode.

Does this low framerate happen even in the config tool demo scene?

Oethe · Jan 28, 2015

Alright I have not been using Extended mode. I have been using Direct HMD. Is that perhaps why I have such low FPS then? and no not in the config tool demo from what I can notice. I have not tried running an app on it.

As to the vsync, it is application decided and turned off currently.

Splatalot · Jan 29, 2015

With 980 SLI you should be able to get 75FPS in stations at 2560 x 1440 and ultra settings as long as you don't have other obvious bottle necks in your system. I get 75 everywhere however sometimes it drops below with an environment change like coming out of SC and it seems to take about 5-10 seconds for the GPU to kick in. However this is probably something downloading and not GPU related. I can even get 75 in the posh stations, but the first time I visited one it took a while before I hit 75. All this was in an Eagle, which seems to render faster than some other ships. I haven't tried others yet, it's just what I've read.

bonsek · Jan 29, 2015

Have you tried switching off Core parking in the power management?

Oethe · Jan 29, 2015

I have not tried disabling Core Parking yet. Also I can't see where hardware wise I would be getting bottleneck on these cards. I did just update the Motherboard the other day. I carried over the everything but I just do not see the bottleneck coming from my cpu.

I tried extended and it sure seems smoother but the problem is there is no way for me to test/confirm my FPS while in said mode. Built in FPS counter and GFE Overlay don't work for me. Any suggestions?

Nemesis109 · Jan 29, 2015

You are running both GPUs in the top 2 PCIe slots right? If you have one GPU in the lowest slot that can reduce the bandwidth to 4x or sometimes 1x depending on the mobo. What is the bandwidth of the PCIe slots set to in the bios? Some cards will run 2 GPUs at 16x & 16x while some lower end cards may drop down to 8x & 8x. anyway it's worth checking it's set to maximum.

Oethe · Jan 29, 2015

Well that brings up an interesting point. The mobo has 4 PCIe slots. my 980 Classified is in the 1st, If I put the 980 SC in the second slot there would be at most like a centimeter of room between the cards. So I have it in the third slot.

The interesting issue is that I have found the FPS is virtually the same regardless of SLi or non.

Pixelpowder · Jan 29, 2015

Are you sure SLI is enabled in nvidia control panel?

You can use MSI afterburner and Riva to get the FPS (set the display to coordinates 300x300 for native res)

There are only mms between my 980s also but it is correct that if the cards are in the wrong slots the BW will be very low and the card will perform very badly

Nemesis109 · Jan 29, 2015

Oethe said:
Well that brings up an interesting point. The mobo has 4 PCIe slots. my 980 Classified is in the 1st, If I put the 980 SC in the second slot there would be at most like a centimeter of room between the cards. So I have it in the third slot.

The interesting issue is that I have found the FPS is virtually the same regardless of SLi or non.

Check the mobo manual the 3rd slot is sometimes only a 4x or a 1x. It is should be ok to run these cards next to each other.

Nemesis109 · Jan 29, 2015

Also check in Nvidia control panel under "configure SLI, surround, physx" it should be set to maximize 3d performance. and physx should be set to auto select.

Lirezh · Jan 29, 2015

Splatalot said:
With 980 SLI you should be able to get 75FPS in stations at 2560 x 1440 and ultra settings as long as you don't have other obvious bottle necks in your system. I get 75 everywhere however sometimes it drops below with an environment change like coming out of SC and it seems to take about 5-10 seconds for the GPU to kick in. However this is probably something downloading and not GPU related. I can even get 75 in the posh stations, but the first time I visited one it took a while before I hit 75. All this was in an Eagle, which seems to render faster than some other ships. I haven't tried others yet, it's just what I've read.

Hah not too fast

Go to a resource extraction site and you can have quad SLI and a quad CPU solution and still not get more than 55-60 fps on lowest graphic settings.
Frontier caps the framerate depending on the number of objects it has to render. That means if you find enough NPCs/players around you the frame rate can not reach 75FPS anymore no matter what rig you might have.
You will see utilization of 10-15% of your computer and experience heavy judder from the low FPS.

@Gethe: you already stated that you did not use extended mode.
That's the reason. Direct mode is NOT supported and will NOT work.
Go use extended mode and I would configure windows so that it disabled your primary screen while rift is on. That gives you another 20% additional FPS if you want.

Raptoyd · Jan 29, 2015

Lirezh said:
Hah not too fast
Go to a resource extraction site and you can have quad SLI and a quad CPU solution and still not get more than 55-60 fps on lowest graphic settings.
Frontier caps the framerate depending on the number of objects it has to render. That means if you find enough NPCs/players around you the frame rate can not reach 75FPS anymore no matter what rig you might have.
You will see utilization of 10-15% of your computer and experience heavy judder from the low FPS.

@Gethe: you already stated that you did not use extended mode.
That's the reason. Direct mode is NOT supported and will NOT work.
Go use extended mode and I would configure windows so that it disabled your primary screen while rift is on. That gives you another 20% additional FPS if you want.

How do you configure that, I was wanting to get mine to do that so when on the rift it disables the primary. Does that affect the settings in game though?

Oethe · Jan 29, 2015

I tested the cards in sli in a different tower with a different mobo (intel chipset instead). Same issue (though it did jump up 10-20fps on MWO) I will have to do the FPS test in extended still. I am getting to the point I may just return these as I matched/outperformed this performance with a GTX 780 Ti.

Phier · Jan 29, 2015

I've got two giggabyte OCed 980's, SLI and 2x DSR and all maxed I get just under 70fps at the worst situations just for reference, so something is wrong. Have you tested your cards with a SLI benchmark like furmark?

Oethe · Jan 29, 2015

No I haven't. Could you get me the results I should be expecting on furmark and I'll get it tested asap.

Oethe · Jan 29, 2015

Update:

The GTX 980 Classified likes to overvoltage itself without permission.

Test 1 SLI:

SCORE:2720 points (45 FPS, 60000 ms)
Max GPU Temp: 62°C
Resolution: 1920x1080 (FS) - AA:8 samples
FPS: min:44, max:47, avg:45 - OPTIONS: DynBkg
GeForce GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2 (10DE-13C0)
9.18.13.4475 (11-12-2014) - GL:nvoglv64
GPU core: 1392 MHz, memory: 3505 MHz
AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor
4018 MHz
8156 MB

Test 2 SLI:
SCORE:8989 points (149 FPS, 60000 ms)
Max GPU Temp: 73°C
Resolution: 1920x1080 (FS) - AA:0 samples
FPS: min:149, max:152, avg:149 - OPTIONS: DynBkg
GeForce GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2 (10DE-13C0)
9.18.13.4475 (11-12-2014) - GL:nvoglv64
GPU core: 1265 MHz, memory: 3505 MHz
AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor
4018 MHz
8156 MB

(I do have 16 GB of Ram just not plugged in since I moved one 8 to the other tower for testing last night.)

Found someone with the same chip my Intel mobo has in it. He got 482 FPS.

Phier · Jan 30, 2015

Your numbers don't look bad, don't take those other high numbers for anything. Some people go all out to get the highest possible numbers, including liquid nitrogen cooling.

http://www.ozone3d.net/gpudb/score.php?which=84954

My score.

Edit: For example I forgot I OCed my system, I just remembered I'm running at 4.2ghz but the score reports my CPU at the stock 3.4.

k8-bit · Jan 30, 2015

Most important and basic thing with Elite is to *not* use Direct Mode. It's not properly supported yet, and typical halves the frame-rate of the refresh rate, regardless of how capable your machine is. It's nice that it works at all yet, but extended mode is where it's at, so far.